


Jewels

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: Kushiel's Legacy - Carey
Genre: BDSM, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 03:32:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Melisande/Phèdre. AU; Phèdre ended up in Valerian House instead of under Delaunay's care, but she still met Melisande...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jewels

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wil/gifts).



> Dear Wil, this came to mind when I saw your request on the unfilled requests list -- well, actually when I checked your Yuletide Author Letter and saw this bit: 'I also adore Phedre's interaction with Melisande, so something going in that direction would also please me. Lastly, something exploring an adept's life in one of the Houses of the Night Court would interest me (what if Phedre had been inducted into Valerian, instead of being Delaunay's Anguissette?)' My mind went 'what if?' and this came out. Hope you enjoy. Cheers, a mad Yuletider.

I remember well the first time I saw Melisande Shahrizai. She came to Valerian House one night, not for any particular occasion, but only for her own pleasure. She strode around the room that we adepts had been called to, impatient, swift to dismiss adept after adept as they did not meet whatever unspecified criteria she was looking for.

She came to me, put her fingers under my chin, and jerked my head up so that our eyes would meet. I could not hold back a gasp at the sight of her sapphire-blue eyes; I thought I would drown in them as a sailor swept overboard into the fathomless ocean.

She, too, gasped.

‘Didier, darling, how long have you been hiding this precious jewel from me?’

‘She has only just begun to make her marque, my lady,’ Didier replied from the doorway to the room, where he had been lounging, watching her make her way around the room. I suspected that those adepts she had dismissed would come under Didier’s eye, and perhaps lash, at a later time. ‘Precious jewels take time to polish...’

‘Bah!’ Melisande flipped a hand at him dismissively and returned her attention to me; I still knelt with my head back, trembling as I tried to keep my eyes fixed on hers without either losing myself in them or giving into my training and lowering my gaze. ‘What is your name, my girl?’

‘Phèdre,’ I whispered.

‘Phèdre.’ My name rolled off her tongue like a cherry dipped in chocolate. ‘Come with me, Phèdre.’

Obediently I rose and went with her. It would never have occurred to me to do aught otherwise, even if I had known then that she was no ordinary patron, no ordinary person. Even when she had had her way with me and left for me, along with coin, a simple black choker with two sapphires set into it to match her eyes, I had no idea of the influence she had.

 

* * *

 

I saw her on and off after that. She asked for me again and again after that first time. Once or twice she would request another Valerian adept to be whipped alongside me, her lash biting first one of us and then the other, and always, always the other adept was the one to use their _signale_, whether they were male or female, highly experienced or fresh and blushing.

‘Phèdre, you are a rare treasure,’ she told me once. ‘Never forget that.’

‘No, my lady,’ I agreed willingly enough, although I could not tell what she felt set me apart from the other adepts save for my stamina and my more powerful reactions to pain. It was just who I was, after all.

 

* * *

 

On the heels of that first memory comes always the memory of the last time I saw her. She was covered in blood; most of it, I think, was other people’s, and not so cleanly drawn as she had sometimes drawn mine. She stood beside Waldemar Selig on the walls of the city, and the Skaldi who had fought so far and so long to reach this place cheered for both of them.

They thought, Melisande and Selig, that because they had claimed those white walls, claimed the city for their own, that everyone within it would bow to them, that everyone would kneel in awe and lower their eyes in obedience and take the invasion for granted.

They were wrong.

The first arrow took Melisande in the heart; Selig turned to catch her as she fell and the second arrow took him in the throat. There was a thunderous silence as both of them toppled from the wall, his arms about her. Then there was a roar as the battle was rejoined, but I think everyone felt that the battle had really ended, that the tide had really turned, when the two of them fell.

I still wore her choker, even after the truth of all her deeds came out in the long and wearisome talks that followed the defeat of Selig’s army. I still wore it even though Didier, Dowayne now, tried to discourage me from it. There were many, many things to which I would yield, but in this case I would not. I still did not know what it was that she saw in me that others did not, but to know that she _had_ seen it was enough to shore up my spirit when the pleasure of pain and the pain of pleasure threatened to grow to be too much to bear.

I wore it, and I remembered her as I had first known her, not as she had died. If I was a rare treasure, then it was at least in part because I was willing to remember her as a woman, not merely as a traitor.


End file.
